John Fetterman's Campaign Just Hit Dr. Oz With a Pretty Good Style Burn

Jonathan Evans
·3 min read
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Photo credit: Getty Images
Photo credit: Getty Images

John Fetterman is a Carhartt guy. A Dickies guy. A shorts-and-hoodies guy. He’s the kind of guy you expect to see buying a hoagie in January with a puffer coat up top and bare shins down below. This is not a Pennsylvania-specific kind of guy, per se—you might spot one in Massachusetts, though he’d be buying a grinder instead of a hoagie—but it is a kind of guy you tend to encounter somewhat regularly in PA. I grew up there. I’ve purchased hoagies in January, and I’ve seen many a shin while doing it. But it does hit a little different when the guy rocking the double-pocket workshirt with a pair of basketball shorts is the Lieutenant Governor of the state who’s currently running for U.S. Senate. There’s an everyman appeal—and Fetterman knows it.

Which brings us to Dr. Oz. He’s running against Fetterman, as you no doubt are aware. And he is very much not a shorts-and-hoodies guy. He’s not a Carhartt guy or a Dickies guy, either. He’s a high-flying, television-personality, Trump-endorsed guy. A basketball-court-inside-the-mansion guy. A tailored-suit guy.

(He is also, as Fetterman delights in pointing out, kind of a Jersey guy. In the interests of not further stoking interstate tensions, I’d like to point out that even my heart goes out to the Garden State on that one. Tough break there, folks.)

Sure, American workwear might be having a breakthrough moment wherein people from all socioeconomic walks of life wear it, but the point the Fetterman camp is trying to make here is pretty clear: Fetterman is Every Guy, while Oz is just some rich guy. Hence the release of a new clip on Twitter where Oz talks about how there’s little difference in happiness between people making $50,000 a year and those making $50 million. Right after that, a little fashion-y nugget: Oz gets his suits made by a Turkish tailor who uses Zegna fabrics.

Cue Fetterman:

This is some pretty great content we’ve got here. And it’s entirely correct that Dr. Oz sucks. So much. But I kinda feel like Zegna is unnecessarily getting caught in the crossfire here. Is it a luxury product, rather than a true necessity? Well, yeah. Rarified when it comes to price? For sure. But we’re still talking about a 112-year-old, family-owned business that’s contributing in no small measure to one of the more important export businesses in Italy. Fetterman’s a proponent of shoring up U.S. manufacturing. Isn’t a business like that—albeit thoroughly Americanized—the sort of thing that would be nice have somewhere in Pennsylvania many years down the line?

Who knows, maybe Fetterman could find a 56XL suit there, or at least the fabric to make it. And as for Oz? Well, here’s hoping a heretofore-untapped bloc of Zegna-aware voters comes out to reclaim their good names and vote against him. With any luck, he’ll have returned to Jersey long before this all comes to pass.

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